Premiere recording of Nicolo Isouard's 1810 comic opera.

Cendrillon opened at the Paris Opéra-Comique on February 22, 1810, and brought unprecedented success to composer Nicolo Isouard and his librettist Charles-Guillaume Étienne. However, beginning in 1817 Rossini's La Cenerentola superceded Isouard's opera and Cendrillon fell into obscurity.The head of Opera Music Studies at Manhattan, William Tracy along with Jennifer Gliere, conductor Pierre Vallet and director Dona D. Vaughn have prepared an entirely new edition and production for this recording. In fact, orchestral parts could not be located, nor the original score. Working from the original manuscript and the first printed edition, Mr. Tracy and Ms. Gliere created the present edition heard here. You can now hear Isouard's brilliant "perfect little jewel box" opera, Cendrillon, last performed in the United States on July 13, 1827 at the Park Theater by a French company from New Orleans.

Review:

"Manhattan School of Music has provided a useful service in resurrecting this forgotten score that has been painstakingly reassembled from poorly preserved, fragmentary archives…the work clearly deserves more attention." (Opera News)

Nicolo Isouard (1775-1818) was born on the island of Malta, had most of his training in Palermo and Naples, and spent the bulk of his career in Paris, composing some 30 operas for the Opera-Comique. Cendrillon was his biggest success, though it eventually got replaced in opera houses by Rossini's Cenerentola.…Isouard's music is attractive and never outstays its welcome. Sometimes it reminds me of Cherubini and other composers active in Paris at the time…The voices are fresh, the small orchestra is generally alert, and the whole thing coheres, which it should because it was recorded ina string of staged performances at the Alliance Française in New York.…Excellent essays in the booklet explain the great lengths to which a team of musicians and theater people went to recreate, as closely as possible, Isouard's original intentions. Their efforts have paid off handsomely…" (American Record Guide)